"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," the University of St Andrews researcher told BBC News.

"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."

British researchers and facilities have had occasional involvement in Seti projects down the years.

The most significant was the use in 1998-2003 of Jodrell bank, and its 76m Lovell radio telescope, in Project Phoenix. This was a search for signals from about 1,000 nearby stars. Organised - and paid for - by the Seti Institute in California, it ultimately found nothing.

Jodrell has since been updated, linking it via fibre optics into a 217km-long array with six other telescopes across England. Known as eMerlin, this system would be a far more powerful tool to scan the skies for alien transmissions.

And Jodrell's Tim O'Brien said Seti work could be done quite easily without disturbing mainstream science on the array.

"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you Seti research almost for free," the Jodrell associate director explained.

"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us."

And Jodrell itself is the management HQ for the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array, a giant next-generation radio observatory to be built in South Africa and Australia. It will have incredible power, not only to screen out interference from TV and phone signals here on Earth, but to resolve very faint signals at vast distances. It has been said the SKA could detect an airport radar on an alien world 50 light-years away.

One attraction of Seti is the great potential for "citizen science" involvement.

The Seti@Home screensaver has proved to be a big hit with the public, using downtime on home and business PCs to analyse radio telescope data for alien signals. The UK has a strong history in this area also with projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which sees citizen scientists help professional astronomers sift and classify the colossal numbers of images we now have of galaxy structures.

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Alan Penny: "It would be complete wimpishness not to try"

Sir Martin said there was huge public interest in the Seti question and some modest state funding for the area would probably get wide support.

"I'd put it this way: if you were to ask all the people coming out of a science fiction movie whether they'd be happy if some small fraction of the tax revenues from that movie were hypothecated to try to determine if any of what they'd just seen was for real, I'm sure most would say 'yes'," he told BBC News.

The issue is whether UK astronomy, currently operating under very tight fiscal constraints, can afford any spare cash for a field of endeavour that has completely unknown outcomes.

"[British astronomy] faces the prospect of a reduced volume of research grants, and participation in future high-impact facilities [eg the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope] is threatened. I would be shocked if STFC's advisory panels rated the support of UKSRN higher than such scientifically compelling competition."

Dr Penny argued Seti could make a strong case, and that his group would try to get research council backing.

"The human race wants to explore, wants to find things out, and if we stop trying we're on the road to decay," he said.

Comments

Comment number 343.

Robert Lucien6th July 2013 - 23:53

As far as this project finding life, the odds are definitely not good. A while ago I was working on a sci-fi epic and knowing the odds based on real science, did this extrapolation. -Humans have an interstellar empire 1000 light years in diameter, in this space there are on the order of 10 million stars. Humans have .... [cont]

Comment number 342.

kinglouis6th July 2013 - 23:22

This is good news. The UK Space program (if there is one) is quiet, too quiet as are the majority of nations who aren't doing enough. Its good private entities are aiming for bigger plans, MarsOne's project is very interesting and if they can pull it off, well more power to them. Men on Mars before 2030, this is what the world needs. 43 years since we touched down on the Moon for the first time!

Comment number 340.

Steve516th July 2013 - 22:43

Lets presume for a moment that alien life out there is maybe at the stone age level and by the time they get to our technical state we will have destroyed ourselves or otherwise no longer transmitting so we will have missed each other by a few thousand years

Comment number 339.

BlowTheWhistle6th July 2013 - 22:42

This kind of research is a training exercise for the people involved and the larger population who get to look on and maybe get inspired by it to pursue sciences.

Life almost certainly exists elsewhere but technological life in the time/space window viewable it is likely very rare - we only have evidence of it arising on our planet once and only in the last 100 years or so of radio signals.

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